When it comes to his campaign for president, Mitt Romney will be damned if he's going to make the same mistakes as John McCain before him. Instead, he's committed himself to making all new, totally original gaffes. As anyone who was alive in 2008 will remember, one of McCain's most stunning errors was selecting a little known governor named Sarah Palin to be his running mate. That risky experiment got up off the table, wandered out of the lab, and has been wreaking her own brand of gosh-darn havoc on the world ever since. Mitt Romney's strategy for avoiding going down the same path to vice presidential ruin is, as ever, a bit tone deaf: He's decided to select, according to one Republican official, an "incredibly boring white guy" for the job.

This "anti-Palin" will presumably not go rogue and start speaking in a giant run-on sentence that never ends; nor will he reveal that Romney is a totally reckless nut who would pick someone dangerous just for a short-term ratings boost. Instead, this future Vice President will be a total snoozefest who raises no red flags and, on the other side of the coin, inspires no excitement. In short, he'll be a lot like Romney himself. But can two Romneys make a right? Will an extra dull white guy make Romney look interesting by comparison? Probably only if he nominates a cardboard cutout of Tim Tebow to be his running mate. But even if he does want someone boring—meaning, in this case, qualified—why does that person have to be white? Are people of color or women automatically too interesting to be eligible? Or, worse, does Mitt think that anyone who isn't a white guy is not fit for the job and bound to make a fool out of him? Either way, he's skating on some mighty thin ice, and he should know that even totally lame white dudes can screw things up pretty badly. After all, Dan Quayle was a pretty boring white guy, and look where that got us.